The reports prompted NBA commissioner David Stern to issue a reprimand to Jordan. The league soon launched the first of two “investigations” into Jordan’s activities, although they were limited in scope. Neither Jerry Krause nor Sonny Vaccaro was approached about an interview. Krause said in 2012 that the Bulls were as surprised as anyone else when Jordan’s issues came to light, but they never made any attempt to learn more about his off-court activities. That was surprising, considering that Krause worked in the Los Angeles Lakers’ front office in the late 1970s. The Lakers, according to former GM Pete Newell, employed off-duty LAPD vice officers to keep track of players’ activities. Phil Jackson would later accuse Krause, aka “The Sleuth,” of spying on the off-court activities of Bulls players, which Krause also denied.
“I have complete confidence in him as a person,” Krause said of Jordan. Nike took a similar approach. “In his private life, he should be able to do what every other person can do. He’s not the president or the pope,” replied Dusty Kidd, a Nike spokesman, when queried by reporters.
“He had problems,” Sonny Vaccaro recalled in 2012. “He’s the only guy that could have survived the gambling stuff. You know that, don’t you?”
Twenty years later, Krause offered his take on the matter, too. “I didn’t know that there were gambling issues,” he said. “I knew he played cards on the airplane. You’d hear the guys yelling at one another. I didn’t know what the stakes were. Later on I found out that they were very high. But all the great old-timers in the NBA used to gamble. I was used to that. I was used to guys playing cards. That’s the way of the NBA. As for Michael, it was just his way of living. So what? He had the money. He was never nonprofessional. That sucker showed up every night and he was ready to play. I saw him do tons of charitable things, good deeds. And tons of asinine things, too. He is who he is.”
Dominion
One by one the icons who had stood so long in front of Jordan fell by the wayside. Isiah Thomas and his Pistons crumbled, then melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West. For Larry Bird, it was the indignity of age, the back troubles, the ball short at the rim, the dismissals in the early rounds of the playoffs. But the biggest icon fell on November 7, 1991, while Jordan was at practice. Lon Rosen, Magic Johnson’s agent, phoned Bulls PR man Tim Hallam that morning.
Rosen delivered to Jordan the same bad news that a small circle of the NBA elite had gotten. Magic Johnson would announce his retirement immediately that afternoon in Los Angeles because he had recently tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Stunned, Jordan gathered himself, then asked about his childhood hero, “Is he gonna die?”
It was the question on the minds of millions as that strange and curious NBA season opened. And many high-profile players quietly went on their own to get tested, because so many of them had partied in the same LA playground where Johnson had explored excess. Jordan himself was not free of these rumors, including one in which he was said to have wagered large sums with teammates over which Hollywood starlets he would bed during the team’s West Coast road swings. He was likewise rumored to have collected on at least one such bet, although how he supposedly confirmed his success was left unclear.
As for basketball, the Bulls opened the season 1–2, and it looked as though they might be in for another transition, marked by more internal struggles and frustration. No team had repeated as NBA champions since the days of Boston’s Bill Russell dynasty until Pat Riley drove his Lakers to a second straight title in 1988. But the pressure of that push had destroyed his relationships with his players. Riley was soon gone and Magic Johnson thoroughly depleted. Jackson was aware of the risks of pushing such an agenda. A host of side issues were already driving his desire to have his players explore meditation and the Zen mentality. For whatever reason, they soon showed extraordinary focus.
“The one great thing about this group of guys,” Jackson would say, looking back, “was that they never let the external stuff bother the team’s play on the floor.”
Krause set the roster with a November trade, sending disgruntled Dennis Hopson to Sacramento for reserve guard Bobby Hansen. After those two early losses, they quickly gained clarity and rode on the wings of a new, emerging force, Scottie Pippen. In 1992, Jordan was far and away the best player in the league, Jim Stack observed, “but Scottie had caught up to the point that their games were 1 and 1A.”
In looking back on the development four years later, Tex Winter pointed out that Pippen, like Magic Johnson, had grown into that special type of player who “made his teammates much better… I think more so than Michael. It’s my personal opinion that there are times—not always, certainly—but there’s times when Michael detracts from his teammates. You’re not gonna find that much in Pippen. He’s totally unselfish. Michael should be selfish because he’s such a great scorer. Michael is uninhibited, and Michael is gonna look to score most of the time when he’s in a position where he thinks he can, whereas Scottie on many occasions will pass up that opportunity just to get his teammates involved.”
Jordan obviously was basketball’s great force, but it was Pippen who learned to channel that force in ways that few other players could.
As he had displayed in the championship series, Pippen had developed into a defensive presence that, in turn, made the Bulls a great defensive team. There would be much focus on the triangle offense as the team got better and better at executing it that season, but their defense gave opponents reason for pause.
“Their defense is so terrific already,” plainspoken Utah coach Jerry Sloan said after studying the Bulls, “that when they decide to step it up a notch, they can annihilate you. If you panic in that situation, you’re in trouble, and most teams panic.”
Jackson himself would come to call it “cracking the case,” that moment in the game when his team would rise to another level. Feeding their opponents’ panic, they raced out to a 37–5 record, including a fourteen-game winning streak in November and December, the longest in the franchise’s history. In January they ripped off another thirteen straight, then slipped late in the month and into February, going only 11–8.
“We had a phenomenal start to the season,” recalled Chip Schaefer, who had been hired as the Bulls’ new trainer. “We had a 37–5 record. But then we headed west and lost four of six games before the All-Star break. Michael got ejected in Utah when he head-bumped Tommie Wood, the official. We were in a triple-overtime game, and Wood called a foul on Michael in the third overtime. It was an accidental head butt. Michael was vehement in his argument, and they bumped heads. Wood ejected him from the game, and we wound up losing with Jeff Malone’s free throws.”
Jordan also fouled out of a game that season. He would not foul out of another game for the rest of his years with the Bulls, despite being an aggressor in Jackson’s pressure defense. In 930 regular-season games in Chicago, he would foul out just ten times. He would foul out just three times in another 179 playoff games with the Bulls. Since the days of Wilt Chamberlain, the NBA had been a league that did not like to lose its stars to disqualification.
“It was a galling loss,” Bulls VP Steve Schanwald remembered of Jordan’s ejection in Utah. “Prior to the call, the game was one of the greatest ever. If not for that call, it likely would have been the NBA’s first quadruple overtime game ever.”
“Then Michael had to sit out the next game, which was the game in Phoenix,” Chip Schaefer recalled. “So he just flew on to the All-Star Game in Orlando.”
Pippen and Jackson joined him there a day later. Even though he had retired in November, Magic Johnson was allowed to return for the All-Star Game, where he owned the weekend and was named MVP.
That spring, in the wake of the revelations about his golf and gambling binges, Jordan addressed the strange arc of his life in an interview with the Tribune’s Melissa Isaacson. “It’s just one of those things that happened,” he said of his sudden fame. “And it shocked everybody. It’s a hell of a burden and it’
s just one of those things that I stumbled into. Then you see people counting on you so much that you start to try to constantly maintain it, and that’s when the pressure starts to mount. Suddenly, everything you do, you have to stop and think, ‘How is this going to be perceived?’ ”
He had been contrite at first. The public still did not yet know about Richard Esquinas. Jordan’s connections with the cast of unsavory characters captured in the police reports and hearing transcripts had been quite enough. “At some point in my life, I probably would have to face it,” he told Isaacson. “Very few people go through their lifetimes without scars. And I went through a six- or seven-year period without them. Now I have a couple of scars and I’ve got to mend them and keep moving on. The scars won’t go away, but you know you’re going to be a better person because of them.”
That might have been true if he had found some other outlet. His was a cycle of high-level competition, interspersed with golf, marathon poker games, and hanging out with his entourage. Also in there he managed to fit in time with his family.
“I tell my wife that I have a split personality,” he said. “I lead two lives. Because in some ways, I’m projected to be a thirty-eight-, thirty-nine-year-old mature person who has experienced life to the fullest and now he’s more or less settled down and focused on very conservative things. But the other side of me is a twenty-nine-year-old who never really got the chance to experience his success with friends and maybe do some of the crazy things that twenty-seven-, twenty-eight-, twenty-nine-year-old people will do. And sometimes I have those urges to do those things, but it can only be done in the privacy of the very small group of people who really know you as that twenty-nine-year-old person.”
Isaacson asked if Jordan could just live as his alter ego. If he had, it would have likely been a short life, and Jordan acknowledged as much, just as he acknowledged that he felt ill at ease with a life beyond basketball, one in which he attempted to endorse political candidates or stand up as a role model. Jordan offered that he simply wasn’t experienced enough to do those things well.
“Everything seemed to snowball for the good,” he said of his wealth and success off the court. “From a financial situation, it’s worth it. But away from that, it has been a burden to a certain extent. It caused extra pressure, but at the same time, it earned the respect and admiration of a lot of people. Everyone likes to be respected and admired.”
In March, Richard Esquinas came to town to watch a Bulls victory over the Cavaliers in the Stadium, a night when Jordan scored 44. The next night, Esquinas joined Michael and Juanita and the Chicago Bears’ Richard Dent and his wife at the Jordan home for dinner. Jordan and Esquinas had been dickering over the golf debt for months. They had played intermittently over the season, and Jordan now owed just under a million. Eventually, the topic came up that night. He and Jordan retreated to the kitchen, where their tone turned heated. Jordan asked him to back off because the revelations of his other golf gambling had turned up the pressure on him.
“You have to give me some space,” Esquinas recalled Jordan telling him. “You have to give me some time. I’ve got these other things to deal with.”
The Bulls closed out the schedule that spring with a blistering 19–2 run to finish 67–15, the franchise’s best record. “We just coasted the rest of that season through one winning streak after another,” Bulls trainer Chip Schaefer recalled. “The team was almost bored with success and could turn it on and off whenever they wanted to.”
With the structure of the triangle offense taking the ball out of his hands a bit more, Jordan’s average had dipped to 30.1 points per game, but it was still enough to claim his sixth straight scoring crown and to win his third league MVP award. He and Pippen were named to the All-Defense first team, and Pippen earned All-NBA second team honors.
“We really had an outrageous year,” Jackson said. “We won sixty-seven games, and basically I felt like I had to pull back on the reins, or they would have tried to win seventy or seventy-five.”
The postseason, however, brought a changed atmosphere, featuring a showdown with Pat Riley’s New York Knicks, a team that had reprised Detroit’s Bad Boys tactics. “We had injuries, and we had to face New York,” Jackson recalled. “And teams were coming at us with a lot of vim and vigor. We lost seven games in our championship run. It wasn’t as easy this second time. There had been a challenge to our character as a team.”
In the first round of the playoffs, the Bulls faced the Miami Heat, a 1989 expansion team making its first postseason appearance. Chicago quickly claimed the first two games in the best-of-five series, then headed to Miami for Game 3. “In Miami’s first home playoff game ever, it was clacker night,” recalled Bulls broadcaster Tom Dore. “What they said was, any time Michael gets the ball or shoots a free throw, go nuts with those clackers. Make all kinds of noise. Well, it worked in the first quarter. The Heat had a big lead. And in fact, we were wondering, ‘Can the Bulls come back from this?’ And Michael stopped by the broadcast table and looked at Johnny Kerr and me and said, ‘Here we come.’ That’s all he said. Boy did he ever. He went absolutely berserk, scored 56 points and the Bulls won, swept the series.”
The trial by fire came early that year, in the second round of the Eastern playoffs. The Knicks muscled their way to a win in Game 1 in Chicago Stadium. B. J. Armstrong helped even the series at 1–1 by hitting big shots in the fourth quarter of Game 2. In Game 3 in New York, Jordan finally broke free of the cloying defense for his first dunks of the series. Powered by Xavier McDaniel, New York fought back to even it with a win in Game 4. In critical Game 5, Jordan took control by going to the basket. The Knicks kept fouling him, and he kept making the free throws, 15 in all, to finish with 37 points as the Bulls won, 96–88.
“Michael is Michael,” Riley said afterward. “His game is to take it to the basket and challenge the defense. When you play against a guy like him, he tells you how much he wants to win by how hard he takes the ball to the basket.”
The Knicks managed to tie it again with a Game 6 win in New York, but the Bulls were primed for Game 7 in the Stadium and walked to the win, 110–81.
They resumed their struggle in the conference finals against the Cavaliers, who managed to tie the series at two games apiece, but the Bulls had just enough to escape Cleveland, 4–2. Jordan had carried his team to a second straight appearance in the league championship series, this time against the Portland Trail Blazers, the team that had bypassed him in the 1984 draft in favor of Kentucky big man Sam Bowie. Whether that decision qualified as one of the greatest sports blunders of all time had been debated in Oregon over the years every time Jordan burned Nike’s hometown team for big points. Bowie, who had missed two years of his career at Kentucky with a slow-to-heal broken leg, would admit in 2012 that he lied to Portland team physicians during a 1984 physical to evaluate his leg. He said he told them he had no leg pain when in fact he did. The irony is that it was Jordan, not Bowie, who first went out with serious injury, although Bowie would never reach his potential. In another irony, it was the Blazers who made it to the league championship series a year before a Jordan-led team reached it. (Portland lost the 1990 title to Detroit.)
The Blazers of 1992 featured Clyde Drexler, Danny Ainge, Cliff Robinson, Terry Porter, and Buck Williams. Fans savored the opportunity to see the match-up with Drexler, who had an athleticism that matched Jordan’s. Veteran observers sensed that Jordan, with his long memory, might try to make a statement as the series was set to open, but none of them could have imagined his outburst in Game 1 in Chicago Stadium. He scored an NBA Finals record 35 points in the first half, including a record 6 three-pointers, enough to bury the Blazers, 122–89. He finished with 39 points after making 16 of 27 field goal attempts, including the 6 three-pointers, all highlighted by his trademark shrug.
“The only way you can stop Michael,” said Cliff Robinson, “is to take him off the court.”
“I was in a zone,” said Jordan, who had focuse
d on extra hours of practice shooting long range before Game 1. “My threes felt like free throws. I didn’t know what I was doing, but they were going in.”
In Game 2, Drexler fouled out with about four minutes left. But the Blazers rallied with a 15–5 run to tie the game, then managed to win, 115–104, on the strength of Danny Ainge’s 9 points in overtime. The Blazers had their split with the series headed to Portland for three games. But the Bulls’ defense and a solid team effort—Pippen and Grant scored 18 each to go with Jordan’s 26 in Game 3—ended thoughts of an upset, although this time Jordan missed all four of his three-point attempts.
The Blazers struggled to stay close through most of Game 4, then moved in front with just over three minutes left and won it, 93–88, on a final surge to even the series at 2–2. Jordan had made just 11 of 26 field goal attempts in Game 4, and it was clear that the critical Game 5 would be a test of endurance, with both teams having played more than a hundred games on the season. Jordan came out aggressively, attacking the basket repeatedly, drawing fouls, and pushing the Bulls to an early lead. Chicago’s coaches had surprised Portland by spreading the floor with their offense, which allowed Jordan open shots off of numerous backdoor cuts. He made 16 of 19 free throws to finish with 46 points, enough to give the Bulls a huge 119–106 win and a 3–2 lead. The Blazers had pulled close, but Jordan’s scoring kept them at bay over the final minutes. His clenched fist and defiant grimace afterward served as yet another reminder to Portland of what had been missed in the 1984 draft.
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